Hi everyone!
I'm currently in the orthodontics application cycle. I was wondering if anyone knew of any schools that were AMAZING in their experience, or if there were schools that I shouldn't even consider.
The qualities I'm looking for in an orthodontics program are: class and faculty diversity, modern technology teaching (lingual braces, clear aligners, etc), clinical > research, partnership with OMFS, and location.
Thanks so much! I hope I hear back before August 1st when I turn my apps in!!!
The good program is the one that you attend. I visited other programs for interviews but 1-day visit wasn’t enough for me to fully learn about their strengths and weaknesses. So I can only speak about the program that I attended. It’s a good 2-year program that put more emphasis on clinical training and less on research. Because it didn’t put too much emphasis on research, getting a MS degree was very easy and less time consuming for me…and that was a good thing. I am glad that I went to a very low tech program that had very limited budget. My program director made us, residents, fabricate all the intraoral appliances by ourselves, made us call our patients for appointments, and made us treat patients without the assistant. I had learned a lot. When I graduated, I had no problem adapting to working at 3 different busy corp offices that booked 80-100 patients a day. That was many many years ago. I’ve just looked at the most recent video of my program. The current residents appear to be a lot more “spoiled” now than when I was there. They have newer chairs. They have all the high tech toys like intraoral scanner and CBCT etc.
IMO, the good program is the program that treats you like a lowly dental student…..that makes you do more clinical/lab work by yourself and does not provide you any assistant. You may not like it now but you will thank yourself later for choosing such program. When you have to do the manual labor by yourself, your hand skills will improve greatly…you bend wires faster, you place a steel ligature on a severely rotated tooth faster etc. You should learn to do the work of an assistant and of a lab technician as much as possible. Being able to multi- task is very important, especially when you first open your new practice or when you work at an office that doesn’t give you enough assistants. When you graduate, you will be able to work at any type of office. The offices that lack modern equipment and have low overhead (ie Corp offices) usually can afford to pay you a lot more than the offices that have high overhead. Don’t be afraid to work at busy offices because the more cases you treat, the more experience you will gain. With busy schedule, you have to teach yourself how to manage the chair time more effectively and to come up with clinical tricks to get tx done faster. Working in such office environment is like doing another year of GPR for general dentists. It’s better than taking expensive (and not very helpful) CE classes.
You need to learn the basics first. When you have firm grasp of the basics (especially in diagnosis and tx planning) of ortho, you should have no problem learning new methods and incorporating new technology into your business. Learning how to use a new equipment is not hard. Companies will send people to your office to train you and your staff because they desperately want you to buy their products. Having practiced ortho for many years and having been very happy with my job, I’d like to offer you this advice. Try to keep everything as simple (ie simple tx plan, fewer wire changes, using fewer appliances, simple but efficient mechanics etc) as possible and you will enjoy your job more. If something has been proven to work well and to be cheap and reliable, don’t change it.
Since you have to pay for your ortho training, you should pick a cheap program. And the shorter the length of the training the better it is. If you really want to become an orthodontist, don’t be picky….apply to as many programs as possible. It’ll cost a lot more money when you have to reapply.
